This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
When I imagined what it would be like to be offered a book deal, it involved leaping up and down and the sound of champagne corks popping.
I actually celebrated it in A&E.
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It all started well. My agent Broo Doherty had been trying to find a publisher for ‘Who’s Afraid of Mr Wolfe?’ for just under a year, so when she rang to say, ‘Charlotte at Quercus really loves the story and she’d like to offer you a contract for two books’, I don’t think the reality hit me until I’d finished the call. Then there was leaping up and down and some not altogether attractive air punching.
We arranged to go out and celebrate.
Fast forward half an hour and younger daughter sidles into the kitchen to report that her elbow feels a bit funny. She’d fallen on it at school, but didn’t want to mention it earlier. It was obvious that she needed someone who wasn’t unhinged by the thought of a publishing deal to have a proper look at it, so I gave her some painkillers and we all set off for A&E.
We sat among the walking wounded and waited. Then waited some more.
Which was when hysteria set in at the way the evening was turning out. We played bizarre I-spy (Curtains? No. Chocolate machine? No. Cracked Collarbone for the guy who’d just gone in to X-ray? Yesss). We tried to find the worst celebrity tan in the magazines lying about and the tackiest wedding photographs.
It felt silly and conspiratorial and it created a warmer family glow than sitting in a restaurant with me smugly repeating, ‘I’ve got a two-book deal.’
When an X-ray finally revealed that the elbow was just bruised, we got a takeaway and ate it back in the kitchen at home. And yes, I did get pleasantly sloshed.
I suppose the lesson I took away – besides ‘don’t arse about and fall on your elbow’ – is that there’s often a gap between how you imagine things will be and how they are. This might, when I shuffle off to Writer Heaven, also sum up my writing career – who knows? All I can say is that right now, I’m enjoying every wonderful and bizarre thing which winning that contract, and the one that came after it, has brought my way.
Playing Grace, Hazel’s third novel, was published in August and picked as one of Woman & Home’s Top 15 Summer reads.